Smoke on the horizon, a huge red ball shining through the haze, and it is the fourth of July. But neither the smoke or the red ball is part of a fireworks show. It's sunset, looking up the coast toward the smoke in Santa Barbara. I missed the very cool picture of a red globe muted by the cloud of smoke while I was driving on the freeway. The fires have muted the celebrations a bit.
I spent the evening sitting outside at a Starbucks reading a good book, enjoying a quiet evening. Driving home through the hills by a small lake, I could see occasional fireworks in the rear view mirror. I had appreciated the quietness of a holiday during the day but it was only this evening that I appreciated that it really was the Fourth of July. I reflected on it on the way home. I watched the fireworks following the Boston Pops concert on TV. The emotion of the fourth came out as the cameras showed the faces of children watching or the soldier holding his children enthralled by the brilliance of the display. The cerebral part came first on listening to an interviewee on Tavis Smiley who stated that if Obama wins the presidency he will not be a spokesman for African Americans but for all Americans. Then David McCullough gave brief snippets on several of his books on US Presidents and other American history to Charlie Rose. As he spoke of Adams and Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt the simple truth of my life welled up in my consciousness, I am proud to be an American despite all of our failures and the current state of the noble experiment begun 232 years ago.
As a boy I would go into our library and pull out the books looking at the pictures, reading a few pages, gently unfolding the maps or copies of documents. The books were 100 or 150 years old, a few over 200 years old. For a 9 or 10 year old boy they were a special world. We had one set 6 or 8 volumes of the letters of John Adams and another set of the letters of Thomas Jefferson. They often only had the response so I would compare letters to Jefferson in the Adams book to find the corresponding letters in the Jefferson book. I do not recall any great findings but there was a feeling of discovery as I went from one volume to the other. As a 10 or 11 year old I learned that Jefferson did not just write the Declaration of Independence in one nice perfect draft. There is a copy of the draft that unfolds from the book, in handwriting with the crossed out words and the insertions. We also had some Civil War histories from the 1880s that had the best maps of the various battles. There was a copy of the Gettysburg Address that I loved to look at. I developed a connection with the history or our nation at a very young age, a sense of where we had come from and the imperfections of the people who brought us here. I did not really learn a lot of facts but the Revolution and the Civil War did become part of my being.
If I went to a site of our early US history tomorrow I would probably shed a tear. I am not a blind patriot but I am a patriot. Perhaps if I were a more effective patriot I should spend one day celebrating our independence and the rest of the year working to make it actually work...
Happy 232nd!
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